Stop fighting

Hey guys,
Hope you are enjoying your last week of prac…Today I came across situation that I never imagined having to deal with as a physiotherapist.
Two of my patients share a room. They are both over 80 and on first impression appear as 2 sweet, polite and nice old ladies. I have been treating them both for the last 4 days; they have similar diagnoses and are often happily chatting away when I come to treat them.
However this morning as I approached their room I heard not the chatter of old women but instead yelling and cursing. I rushed in concerned that an unwanted guest had entered the room but found only them. When I asked what had happened, I got an array of answers, from both women at the same time, none of which really making much sense.
Unsure of how to calm either woman down, I excused myself and went and spoke with the nurse, apparently they had been at it all morning. The nurse had said their was an incident involving one lady walking in on the other women while she was on the toilet without knocking, and then there was a dispute about the air conditioner, and something about a lost comb followed up with a somebody ignoring the other one. The nurse was feed up with them.
I went back into the room, by this stage one lady was crying and the other was “bitching” on the phone to her daughter. I seriously felt like I was back in year 8!! I tried to get the crying lady to come to the gym with me, I thought at least this way the two of them could get some distance. She blatantly refused any physio saying she was too upset to do any exercises.
So I tried another angle, asking her if she would just come for a walk with me and tell me her side of the story. Surprisingly this worked, which was good because I got her ambulating without her realising she was doing physio. She told me what had happened and how she did not want to be fighting with her room mate. I think they had just been spending too much time in close proximity to each other. In the end they both agreed to stop the bickering and to use their energy to get well rather that fight. As I left the room I realised providing treatment to a patient is only a part of the role of a physio, you must also be able to deal with whatever day to day issues arise. Sometimes to actually provide treatment to your patients you must first solve another problem. This situation just shows how “script” or wrote-learnt physiotherapy would never work in the real world. You have to be flexible and ready to face whatever situations present themselves to you everyday. I think that this is what makes physio (like all health professions) such a fantastic field as two patients are never the same…